The Energy Frontier Research Centers program aims to accelerate such transformative discovery, combining the talents and creativity of our national scientific workforce with a powerful new generation of tools for penetrating, understanding, and manipulating matter on the atomic and molecular scales. ORNL is also home to two DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers, the Fluid Interface, Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Center and the Center for Defect Physics. The goal of the FIRST CFRC is to address the fundamental gaps in our current understanding of interfacial systems of high importance to future energy technologies, including electrical energy storage (batteries, supercapacitors) and heterogeneous catalysis for solar energy and solar fuels production. The CDP aims to develop a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms of defect formation, evolution and interactions that determine material behavior under irradiation.

Other Centers

Many other Centers and Institutes call ORNL home such as the National Center for Computational Sciences, the Climate Change Science Institute and the Center for Molecular Biophysics. For more information on these, and other Centers at ORNL, please select the links below.